It does have ‘meow’ but sadly no ‘wow’. If I was forced to boil it down into one cute sentence, that’d be my review of London’s first ever cat café, Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium, on Bethnal Green Road. Heading home after our visit, I knew I’d be spending the next few hours and the following few hundred words explaining – and hopefully justifying – my negativity. Believe me, before I begin, I really did want to love this place. I still do. I’m as surprised and disappointed as anyone else that it wasn’t exactly the cat’s pyjamas. And here’s why.
We arrived at Lady Dinah’s on the dot for our booking and joined the back of a queue about 20 people long, stretching out onto the pavement. The whole group squeezed into a small entrance hall – actually the kitchen – with what looks like a service counter, but isn’t, behind which a girl in an apron was making sandwiches. A closed door at the far end of the room had an A4 printout stuck to it, asking us to wait to be invited inside. The main entrance door was then locked shut behind us.